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<span><img src="../shared/images/Small-Vienna-Logo.jpg" alt=""/>&nbsp;&nbsp;</span>
<span class="header">Introduction to Vienna</span>
<p>Vienna is an application that allows you to read RSS or Atom news feeds on your Mac OS X computer. It automates the
job of retrieving news articles from all subscribed feeds and storing them in a local database for reading off-line. It
provides features that allow you to search feeds for keywords or phrases, tag articles with a flag for future reference
and organise related feeds together under groups. You can create smart folders that make it easy to dynamically retrieve
and view all articles in the database that match a search criteria. The built-in web browser allows you to go to the
articles web page or view links in the article directly in Vienna in separate tabs.</p>
<p>Vienna is designed to be simple and easy to use. A clean, uncluttered, interface maximises the space for articles and
just a few controls are needed to perform the most common actions in the user interface.</p>
<b>Getting Started</b>
<p>If this is the first time that you have used Vienna then it will have created a new database for you
and added some sample news subscriptions. So go ahead and press Command+R or choose Refresh All Subscriptions
from the File menu to grab the latest articles from those subscriptions.</p>
<p>Alternatively, subscribe to your own news feeds. There are various ways to find feeds. When browsing
the web, look out for the <img src="../shared/images/rssfeed.gif" alt="RSS feed icon"/> or XML icons indicating that the page has a feed associated
with it. Alternatively almost all online blogging services such as LiveJournal or Blogger provide RSS feeds as
an alternative to reading the postings online.</p>
<p>If you know the user name of a blogger on LiveJournal, Blogger, MSN Spaces or Xanga then Vienna makes it easier
to subscribe to their news feed. Start by pressing Command+N or from the File menu, choose the New Subscription command.
In the "Create a new RSS subscription" panel, pick the blogging service from the drop down list and enter the
user name in the input field below. Then choose Subscribe and Vienna will add the subscription to the folder list. If
you are connected to the internet at the time, it will also immediately start collecting articles from the feed.</p>
<p>You can also use Vienna in relation with an account in an Open Reader server. Go into Preferences... / Syncing and tick the
"Sync with an Open Reader server" checkbox.<br />
Beforehand, think about which feeds you prefer reading through Open Reader and which you'll get through direct access.
Vienna will avoid creating duplicates between the two categories, but if you have feeds inside Open Reader
which Vienna already fetches directly, you will have discrepancies between your reading lists.
So, organize your feeds accordingly.<br />
You should take into account these elements :</p>
<ul>
<li>Open Reader feeds can be synchronized across multiple devices/applications supporting it</li>
<li>Open Reader does not support feeds requiring username/password</li>
<li>Fetching feeds directly avoids the Open Reader service as an intermediary between you and the publishing site;
for less "popular" feeds, you'll get articles sooner.</li>
<li>Generally, directly fetching feeds from their original website generates less network traffic. When the server signals there
is no new articles since last fetch, Vienna avoids an useless download.</li>
</ul>
<p>Normally you need to manually tell Vienna when to refresh all your subscriptions. However you can opt to ask Vienna
to automatically refresh at time intervals. In the General section of the Preferences, pick the desired time interval
from the drop down list next to 'Check for new articles'. Vienna needs to be running for it to automatically refresh
subscriptions.</p>
<p>To read articles, press the Spacebar to skip to the next unread article in any subscription. Each article is marked
as read automatically after a short delay. If you prefer to wait until you move to the next unread article before the
current one is marked read you can adjust the behaviour in the General tab of the Preferences. To mark an article as
unread again, choose the Mark Unread command from the Article menu or simply press the 'R' key.</p>
<p>Finally, you can view the article web page or any web page links in an article within Vienna. By default clicking
on a web link within Vienna will open the web page in a new tab. Vienna provides a lot of basic web browsing support
itself but there may be times when you will prefer to open links in your default web browser. If you prefer to view
all web pages outside of Vienna then enable the 'Open links in external browser' option in the General section of the
Preferences. However if you prefer to view the current link or page in your external browser, right click on the page
and choose the "Open Link in XXX" or "Open Page in XXX" option where XXX will be the name of your default browser.</p>
<p>Once you've got comfortable using Vienna, go ahead and explore the various options. You can change the style in
which the articles are displayed through the Style drop down list in the View menu. You can find many more custom
styles at the <a href="http://www.vienna-rss.com/?page_id=76">Downloads</a> page on the Vienna web site along with custom scripts that allow you to integrate Vienna with
other applications on your machine. Or experiment with smart folders to organise articles according to criteria based
on the contents of each article. For example, you can easily set up a smart folder to group together all articles that
mention "Joss Whedon" and "Firefly" to find references to the Firefly cult series or the spin-off movie.</p>
<p>If you have any questions about Vienna or run into problems, send an email to <a href="mailto:vienna-rss-help@lists.sourceforge.net">Vienna Help</a> or head over to the <a href="http://forums.cocoaforge.com/viewforum.php?f=18">
Support forum</a>.</p>
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